Yea bchad is right, evolution has allowed us to adapt to a more grain based diet. Some more than others I guess.
Well, diet should be dependent on your goal and your genetic breakdown. People have different gut bacteria that act differently to different foods, thus your diet is not absolute but rather dependent upon your own gut breakdown. The next wave of nutruition is going to sequence genomes -using stool samples- and produce the diet that best fits your breakdown. Gut bacteria have long been known as important but i think science will show they play a huge part in your physique.
Exactly and very good point! Because “nutrition science” is not a real science yet. It’s all just crap (myths, opinions, bad science, no universal theory, etc). It will never be a real science until they 1) accept evolution exists, 2) accept evolution applies to humans, 3) tie all their observations back to an evolution-based theory of nutrition. Since Americans do not believe in evolution it’s check mate. Shrug, but I already solved the problem, see above.
You missed opportunity cost. That they are likely more adapted to grains than they were (there was massive ill health at the start of the Neolithic revolution, which lasted for thousands of years), does not mean they are more adapted to them than the other options (meat and asparagus for example).
What a load of italian horseshit. From the small print disclosures in the actual publication:
The INHES study was funded by Barilla Spa and by the MISE (Italian Ministry of Economic Development) within the frame of the ATENA program MI01_00093 – New Technologies for Made in Italy (D.I. PII MI 6/3/2008).
Barilla Spa only happens to be one of the largest pasta manufacturers in the world, but the researchers “declare no conflict of interest” so it’s all good you guys.
I’m sure they’ll think twice before coming up with an article appropriately titled “CONFIRMED: PASTA MAKES YOU A FATASS” while their grant is being funded by spaghetti sales.
hahaha this is my favourite section of AF for sure!!!
pa. your argument is basically “new = bad”. you have not proof that grains are bad, only that grains are a new addition to the diet and it is perceived that we are currently in bad health as a species. if you remember correctly, 5000 years ago people lived to age 30 and ate 1/4 of what we currently eat. if anything, i’d say it’s the quantity of food consumed more so than what is being consumed.
bchad. i’d expect polynesians to have a fairly grain free diet. mostly roots and seafood. few pieces of land or river systems to grow grains.
.
has editing been removed from AF?
Part of the problem with these diet vs evolution things is that evolutionary pressures have only a marginal effect on things that help you after you produce offspring.
We are likely not going to evolve to be more cancer resistant or even circulatory disease resistant through normal evolutionary processes (I’m excluding social processes of education and such), because evolution only selects out things and behaviors that kill you off before you’ve been able to raise children that are themselves able to reproduce.
There may be a marginal effect in the sense that being a grandparent might help your children and grandchildren survive, but it is orders of magnitude less influential than the things that help you survive until your gamates fuse with someone else’s. That’s why we are actually pretty hardy up to our 30s and maybe early 40s, because for most of human history and prehistory, after you’re 40, the vast majority of us have done our part for the perpetupation of the species.
The problem with PA’s analysis is that he presupposes some kind of optimal human based on what was optimal 20,000 years ago, which I’ll bet he’s not really even able to define if we press him on it.
I’m not saying that we are necessarily optimal today: evolution is a kind of dance between species composition and how their environment evolves, and there can be feedback loops between them. I don’t think sedentary lifestyles where we stuff ourselves with pringles and cokes is particularly optimal, but even for those who take their diet seriously and keep up with current research and exercise, what is an optimal human being is almost always a moving target, at least on the timescales we associate with evolution.
A lot of what we think of as optimal is mostly an aesthetic judgment, like “he’s optimal because he has SRK’s suckable ripped abs, too bad civilizaiton is in decline.” Some people in the 1930s thought that blond, blue-eyed so-called “Aryan” features were optimal, and believed that creating a thoroughbred line of humans was the way to optimality… but genetic research and just plain animal husbandry suggests that if you want to breed a durable animal, you want to cross-breed them rather than inbreed them. So this idea of optimality was really an aesthetic judment (after all, one of their big proponents had been an artist in an earlier career).
We hopefully won’t stuff people in gas chambers because people aren’t aesthetically optimal, but most of us don’t really ask ourselves what is optimal in fact… we just decide what we like to look at and say “why can’t more people be like that.” We can’t really talk about what is optimal without trying to define it in ways that can be measured.
Not on purpose… the tech guys are looking into it.
LOL, nice. I didn’t even look. Almost all nutrition “science” is conducted by B-team intelligences, who are desperately trying to earn a living thru a little corporate funding. If they were A-team they would be working for Google, or a quant at a HF. They have no options so they are easy to corrupt, they make up some nonsense “science” in exchange for a small paycheck. And so the misinformation grows! It’s a big problem, this is a serious field and we needs Einsteins, but almost nobody will go into the field because it’s a voodoo/bullshit cluster…a career killer.
Me, I’m A-team, and received zero dollars for my 1000hrs work on this topic. I did it pro bono for the homo sapiens! 
gametes
This tribe is called the Irish
Since the grain eaters are still around and the plant eaters aren’t, grain eaters declare victory over plant eaters.
For whatever it’s worth, I think that grains are plants.
^ Minor detail.
You keep making these bets, and keep losing. I wonder if you have checked the score recently? 
Uhh, perhaps not having the five metrics of metabolic syndrome would be a good place to start? These five metrics can be measured. Foods with a high delta (see my earlier forumla) increase these markers, foods with low delta decrease these markers. This is science, decades of data, it is known.
It’s not nearly so mysterious and unknowable as you believe, as with most things it’s easy once the correct answer becomes known. This is just all new information for you guys, too overwhelming.
20k years ago is optimal? I think I finally figured this out. purealpha is the mutant supervillain Apocalypse. This explains his superiority complex, as well as his preoccupation with the devolution of humans.
red meats decrease metabolic syndromes? hmmm 